Mangrove Bayou Read Online Free Page B

honorary member of the Osprey Yacht Club. Wait until they get a load of you .”
    “Is the yacht club crowd a little…ah…bigoted?”
    For once June didn’t say anything. Finally Bubba spoke. “You’re not…you know… Jewish , are you?”
    They all laughed. “The main island is this one, Barron Key,” June said. “We got your middle-class people here and some wealthy ones on the north end. They even got their own yuppie shopping mall, across the street from the grocery.”
    “Crime? Citizen interaction?” Troy asked.
    “This time of year it’s mostly just locals with a few tourists,” Bubba said. “Not much in the way of crime. Some burglaries, lot of too-much drinking. That stuff. In the winter, December through early May, the tourists outnumber us two to one. We get a lot of cars ticketed or towed, drunks, grab-ass by the younger ones, the older ones mostly sit in chairs on their motel balconies and stare at the sunsets. Don’t they have sunsets where they come from?”
    Troy smiled. He picked up the Glock on his desk, locked back the slide and looked into the chamber. He stuck a little fingernail into the chamber to reflect the overhead light and looked down the barrel. “Dirty,” he said. “Let’s see yours.” He held out his hand and Bubba pulled his own gun out, dropped the magazine and ejected the round in the chamber, and handed it across. “This one’s dirty too,” Troy said after a moment. He handed Bubba back his gun. Bubba looked like he wanted to say something but he swallowed it.
    “OK,” Troy said. “The trucks look good. We can clean the guns. I will never again see an empty pizza box on the table in the break room, and keep that place cleaner. Buy some roach motels. Get a cat. Something. There will be changes. I hope to make those changes later, after I see how things roll here. I’ll try not to be obnoxious about it. But if nobody else likes them I honestly won’t give a damn. I’ll like them and that’s what counts.”
    “Do you want me to call everyone in now? Let them all meet you at once?” June asked. “You can tell us about your changes that you don’t give a damn if we like or not.”
    “Not now. Let’s get me settled in for a few weeks and then we’ll see. I do want to at least meet everyone right away. But the people off-duty deserve to be off-duty. I can talk one-on-one with each person, as they come in for shift changes.”
    “Two people come on at midnight,” Bubba said. “Midnight-to-eight shift.”
    “Then I’ll be here at midnight. Who’s on duty right now?”
    “Me and Milo Binder,” Bubba said. “Milo always gets the day shift. He’s out patrolling.”
    Troy was putting his Glock and the two magazines into a desk drawer and something in Bubba’s voice made him look up.
    “Don’t we rotate the shifts here?”
    “Yep. End of each month,” Bubba said. “Two people per shift and three per shift on Fridays and Saturdays. And you’re on call twenty-four hours. But Milo Binder is the mayor’s nephew. His sister’s kid. He gets his pick of shifts and his pick is always the day shift.”

Chapter 6
    Sunday, July 21
    John Barrymore looked up from the book he was reading as his wife let herself into the house and came into the den. “Did you find what you needed?” he asked. She had left earlier to get some dirty clothes off their boat so she could take those to the dry cleaners.
    “All set, honey-bunny,” Katie said. “But I think there’s somethin’ wrong on the boat. Heard water splashing in the motor thing, you know, under the back bedroom.”
    “The aft cabin, we call that,” Barrymore explained. “The engine space is under that.” He had tried, patiently, to teach Kathleen about boats, to get her to help him run the big trawler yacht. She never seemed to pick up any of the terminology and never wanted to do any work on the boat. That was all right, he told himself. He loved her and she was just a little slow to come around. She